Summary: Free 6 week self-study course to learn about Drupal. Week- by-week emails to help motivate you and organize your learning experience. Think of it as a book-club for free learning materials about Drupal.

Acknowledgements

Funding of the development of this course is provided by Acquia http://acquia.com/ to faciliate learning in the Drupal community. This course is part of P2PU's School of Webcraft organized by the Mozilla Drumbeat: http://www.drumbeat.org/p2pu-webcraft Web Enabled http://webenabled.com/ are supporting this course by providing an easy to use learning sandbox in their hosting environment. Numerous Drupal community members have created the open education resources which will be used in this course, they will be credited in the respective lessons.

What is this course about?

Problem: What is Drupal? What can it do? Drupal is peculiar, the features which make it powerful and different from other systems, also make it difficult to grasp. There are excellent resources out there, but a novice user can get google-itis from searching through material which isn’t at the right level, shows out dated practices, or is not up to date. This course will be a self-study introduction to take people on a rolling basis through the course.

How it works: Each week, you login to the site which contains 2-3 hours of selected self-study videos, tutorials and materials to work through. You will also get access to a recorded webinar* discuss the materials. Login to P2PU.org to discuss each weeks materials with fellow students. Acquia partner Web Enabled are offering a push-button hosting environment as an option for new users to learn on and try out some advanced features of Drupal.

* The first time it is run, a LIVE webinar is held so guest guides can answer learner questions- “What kinds of problems and questions did they find?” to talk about that weeks learning materials. These are recorded, and when students work through the course later, they watch the recorded webinars.

Each week:

• Mondays: Students receive weekly email
• Wednesdays: Pilot course: participate in live online session (in future,Watch recorded session)
• Pilot course live session times: 9 AM PST/ 10 AM MT/ 11 CT / 12 EST. Information sent via email.
• During the week:
  • Do learning activities (for example, watch a Dojo session, or other video, complete activities)
  • Participate in online discussion

Contents
 

A. Create a rough sketch of the design

B. Page layout and color scheme

C. Creating the design 

D. Slicing the design

E. Coding the webpage

Planning (subject to change)

Day 1: creating the assets (youtube videos 1 - 6, see Course Material)
Day 2: creating the design (youtube videos 7-12, Course Material)
Day 3: coding the design: structuring it
Day 4: coding the design: styling it - without the images
Day 5: styling it: applying the images to the design
Day 6: Using Web fonts from the Fontsquirrel library
Day 7: Answering questions and Course Review

This course is based on the book Dive into Python by Mark Pilgrim and is freely available.  You can either choose to download the .zip file containing the .pdf and associated files, or you can read the book online.  Please note for non-native speakers of English that the book may have been translated into your native language.  

Dive into Python is meeting on the forums only.  

A thread about Open Hippel was started on Groups.Drupal.org back in April 2010 - http://groups.drupal.org/node/59918#comment-248839

Course summary also on https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/p2pu/courses/socialwebdrupal

Open Hippel is basically a Social Web App that allows anyone to form groups around their interests. It'll have tools to help people make decisions as a group, set criteria and milestones, and also have personal profile and history so people with skills can be connected with people needed those skills.

So far, TEDxTokyo Innovators Hub and K. International School are two of our biggest supporters, and Keio University had made it an official school project, which means students can be credited for working on it!

My plan is to open the development of this Open Hippel platform up as a course. We'll have hands on development classes, (we need some Drupal gurus from Acquia to help out on this!) The course work will be documented and with the help of Keio students, translated into Japanese. By the end of the course, the whole "book" will be available online under CC license.

In learning, it is far better to have a project that is real and has impact on the real world! Just like Stanford's project on Extreme Affordability products, students are far more engaged when they're working on real world projects. I think Open Hippel can similarly be that engaging project at P2PU.

Ruby is a fascinating object-oriented language suited for many purposes.  Rails is a popular web framework for Ruby.

This course will introduce the Ruby programming language, focusing on those features and concepts that will be important when developing web-based, database-backed Rails applications.

Course participants will learn with freely available web resources and by completing small assignments.  Participants will also create a simple web application individually or in small groups.

Because this course will cover a lot of ground, it will be completed over 10 weeks.

Online maps are a rapidly growing technology.  The unique connection of maps to real world information has given open and crowdsourced maps some advantages over even the best-funded companies.

A Map Making and Programming Class

Course participants will add part of their community to the global OpenStreetMap, learn the basics of creating interactive online maps with OpenLayers, then research and design their final application.

Topics

* OpenStreetMap.org, a free and open "Wikipedia of maps," has time and time again proven the usefulness of open data.  In early 2010, responders to the Haiti earthquake turned to OpenStreetMap for the most detailed and up-to-date maps.

* OpenLayers.org, a free and open source JavaScript library, will be used to explore the basics of adding maps to web pages.  This experience gives you the know-how to use map APIs from Google, ESRI, Microsoft, or CloudMade (these alternatives will be part of a group discussion)

* Applications of maps, including open source solutions for business, disaster response, open government, and the environment, will be discussed.   Participants choose a research topic.

* A final 'interest project', chosen by the participant, will be a web map which displays real-world data and produces an informative, interactive, artistic, and/or persuasive online experience.

Python (http://www.python.org) is a powerful, high-level programming language that is easy to learn and easy to make highly customizable web-sites and play with web technologies. While for many enterprise-class sites, a complicated stack of technologies and integrated web frameworks may be required to achieve complex goals, using python and WebOb (http://pythonpaste.org/webob/) -- a basic request/response object -- allows a first-principles approach to understand the HTTP protocol and making a wide variety of web sites in a flexible manner.

The course will center on using python and associated technologies to explore how HTTP and HTML works. Only the basics will be covered, but this should be enough to point newcomers with the predisposition towards making and debugging more complex sites. Students will create web services that include hosting static content, persisting data using the filesystem, middleware, generating dynamic server responses, and using a template language (genshi). The basics of REST and good architecture will be introduced covering the basics of how to view programming and good architectural design.

From https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/p2pu/courses/pythonwebservices

Course material:

http://k0s.org/mozilla/craft/